In a recent
article about Shirley Jackson, the president since
1999 of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI)―a private university
located in Troy, New York―the Chronicle of Higher Education
revealed that, in 2012 (the latest year for which statistics are
available), she received over $7 million from that institution. Like
many modern campus administrators, President Jackson was also given a
large mansion, first class air travel, and a chauffeured luxury car
to transport her around the campus.

Thanks to the fact that Jackson also
serves on at least five corporate boards, including those of IBM and
Marathon Oil, she supplements this income with more than a million
dollars a year from these sources.

Despite repeated complaints about
Jackson from faculty and students, RPI’s board of trustees has
invariably expressed its total confidence in her. Indeed, the board
chair recently declared that she is worth every penny of her
substantial income. This unwavering support appears to be based not
only upon Jackson’s fundraising prowess, but upon the corporate
approach that she and the board share.

A key component of this corporate
approach is embodied in Jackson’s development and implementation of
the Rensselaer Plan, a venture that includes an enormous construction
program at a staggering cost. Worried about their institution
falling behind rivals in the race to build a high-powered, modern
campus, trustees found this university expansion deeply satisfying.
But it also meant that RPI ran up its debt to $828 million―over six
times its level when Jackson took office. As a result, Moody’s
downgraded RPI’s credit rating twice, and describes the financial
outlook for RPI as “negative.”

Of course, when operating as a
business, there are many ways to pay a top executive’s hefty salary
and recoup huge financial losses. As is the practice on other
campuses, RPI employs a considerable number of adjunct faculty
members―part-timers paid by the course, with pitiful salaries, no
benefits, and no guarantee of employment beyond the semester in which
they are teaching. One
of these adjuncts, Elizabeth Gordon, was paid $4,000 a
course―about $10 an hour by her estimates. “Because the pay was
so low,” she recalled, “it was like being a volunteer serving the
community.” But, as the size of her RPI writing classes grew, she
became concerned that the pace of grading, student meetings, and
course preparation was undermining her health, which she lacked the
insurance to cover. So she quit. Many other adjuncts, however, are
still at RPI, scraping by on poverty-level wages and enriching
President Jackson.

RPI’s adjuncts once had a voice on
campus, as some of them served on RPI’s
Faculty Senate. But that came to an end in 2007, when
Jackson abolished that entity. From the administration’s
standpoint, the abolition of the Senate had the welcome effect of not
only depriving adjuncts of their minimal influence, but of crippling
the power of regular faculty, as well. The previous year, a faculty
vote of no confidence in Jackson’s leadership had been only
narrowly defeated. Thus, the administration’s abolition of the
Faculty Senate served as a pre-emptive strike. Asked by irate
faculty to investigate the situation, the American Association of
University Professors condemned the administration’s action as
violating the basic principles of shared governance. The
administration
responded that RPI “has never recognized the role of
the AAUP in what we regard as an internal issue.” Ultimately,
faculty resistance collapsed, leaving faculty powerlessness and
demoralization in its wake.

The Jackson administration, using what
union organizers charged were tactics
of intimidation, also succeeded in defeating efforts
to unionize RPI’s downtrodden campus janitors and cafeteria
workers. During one union campaign among janitors,
the
lead organizer recalled, security guards threw him off
campus and the administration fired a janitor on the organizing
committee.

In a further effort to cover the
administration’s costly priorities, student tuition was raised
substantially during the Jackson years. In 2013-14, it reached
$45,100―$25,608
above the average tuition at New York’s four-year colleges. Of
course, beyond tuition, there are expenses for college fees, room,
board, and books, placing RPI’s own estimate of student costs for
attendance in 2014-2015 at $64,194.
Perhaps to soften the blow to students of this enormous price tag or
to signal them about what type of school this is, the RPI web page
remarks helpfully that “many of our professors have close ties with
top global corporations.”

Having created the very model of an
undemocratic, corporate university, President Jackson is
appropriately imperious. According to the Chronicle
of Higher Education, she has a series of rules
that are clear to everyone. These include: 1) Only she is
authorized to set the temperature in conference rooms; 2) Cabinet
members all rise when she enters the room; 3) If food is served at a
meeting, vice presidents clear her plate; and 4) She is always to be
publicly introduced as “The Honorable Shirley Ann Jackson.”
Falling into rages on occasion, she publicly abuses her staff and
frequently remarks: “You know, I could fire you all.” In 2011,
RPI’s Student Senate passed a resolution criticizing her “abrasive
style,” “top-down leadership,” and the climate of “fear”
she had instilled among administrators and staff. It even called
upon RPI’s board of trustees to consider Jackson’s removal from
office. But, once again, the board merely rallied in her defense.

Perhaps, though, the response of the
board of trustees is not surprising. After all, developments at RPI
are very much in line with trends at institutions of higher
education: inflating administration salaries; exploiting adjunct
faculty, regular faculty, and other workers; strengthening
administration power; raising tuition to astronomical heights; and,
above all, running colleges and universities like modern business
enterprises. RPI actually presents us with a glimpse of the future
of higher education―a future that we might not like very much.